Amid the early chatter about the commercialisation of the Edinburgh festival fringe, a number of venues have claimed strong advance sales, with one reporting a 70% increase on box-office gross compared to the same stage last year.

The Fringe Society only realises full festival-wide sales figures after its culmination at the end of August, but individual venues are confident, despite fears about the Olympics' effect on box-office grosses. In 2008, when the two events last overlapped, ticket sales dropped by 10%, though that year also suffered from the collapse of the festival's central ticketing system.

With that in mind, some shows were put on sale before the usual June launch, with some tickets available as early as January. In recent years, though, some venues had started selling tickets themselves before they were available through official fringe channels.

Sam Gough, event manager at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, which plays host to Alan Davies and Jason Byrne this year, told the Scotsman: "We are well ahead of all our targets and are actually 70% ahead of where we were this time last year. It has definitely benefited us having shows on sale so early and a lot of our acts are appearing here as part national tours which has also helped."

Elsewhere, the Stage reports that sales for shows at the Pleasance and Zoo Venues are both up on last year, while The Stand comedy club is "on a par with last year, which was a record-breaking year for us", according to its founder Tommy Sheppard.

Director of Pleasance, Anthony Alderson told the Stage: "We are delighted to say that we opened slightly up, just 3%, on last year's figure. We reckon we do about 30% at the point at which we open and I think we are at about 28% of where we hope we might get to, so we have an awfully long way to go."

Meanwhile Zoo Venues' director Matt Beer said: "Our figures are a little bit skewed this year as we've cut back from three venues to two. But for the venues where we can directly compare, our advance sales are about 5% up on 2011 and we're very optimistic."